Dark Chocolate and Your Health
These days, dark chocolate is getting a lot of attention in the media because of its reputed health benefits. But where there's hype, you're almost sure to find misinformation. So while chocolate can be an excellent nutritional resource, I'd like to separate fact from fiction so that you can make smart decisions about the role chocolate plays in your life.
All chocolate is made from the cacao bean, and this is where the health benefits really come from. Cacao is possibly the number one food source of both magnesium (the #1 dietary deficiency in America) and antioxidants. It also boasts a number of neurotransmitters, which make chocolate such an outstanding "feel good" food. (These can help to regulate brain function, sleep, hormones, and more.)
And contrary to popular belief, there is probably no caffeine at all in cacao. There is a similar element to it, but the lift it gives is not like the jittery lift of caffeine.
To make chocolate from cacao, however, other ingredients are added, and this is where you have to be careful. Dairy products (as found in milk chocolate) and sugar (found in almost all chocolate) both diminish the health benefits of the cacao. Couple this to the fact that most cacao sources are not organic, and you've got an unhealthy mix of milk, sugar, and toxins competing with the nutritional value of cacao.
It's also useful to point out that you can tell a lot about a chocolate by comparing grams of sugar with grams per serving. Many will claim to be low in sugar because the serving size is relatively small; but the percentage of sugar per serving is typically between 25% and 50%.
By the way, some types of sugar have lower glycemic index levels but are still bad for your health in countless ways. So I still consider these more like candy than like a superfood.
Now if you're going to eat chocolate as a candy, then you can spend money on whatever tastes best to you. But if you're going to spend it on chocolate as a health supplement -- and the best tasting one! -- then you'll have to invest more, because better ingredients are going into it.
For instance, by spending more, you can get chocolate made from organic ingredients. You can get chocolate that replaces sugar with healthy, natural alternatives like xylitol or agave nectar. And in some cases, you can find raw chocolate that preserves all the nutritional value of the original cacao beans.
After reviewing all of the potentially healthy chocolate I could get my hands on, I currently recommend one in particular, and as a result, we now carry it in our store.
Gnosis Chocolate
This chocolate is sold through a traditional retail setting (affiliate program expected soon if you want to share it), and is the one we now carry in the Biophysics Center. (We never carried chocolate before, but then we didn't know that such healthy chocolate was an option for our clients!) This chocolate is made by hand, uses no soy lecithin as a short cut for good consistency, is organic, is sweetened with agave nectar (safe for diets and diabetics!), and includes an assortment of wonderful ingredients like crystal manna (a form of blue-green algae). Best of all, it's RAW, preserving the health benefits of the raw cacao bean.
This is a rich, soft chocolate bar that has captured just about everyone we've given samples to. Even at $8.95 per bar, it sells quickly because of its amazing taste and extraordinary quality as a food.
Flavors We Currently Stock:
Simplicity
This is the "plain" bar, and the basis for all other bars. It's made with cacao beans, cacao butter, agave nectar (a low-glycemic natural sweetener), vanilla bean, and crystal manna (a brand of blue-green algae).
Coconut Almond
"Simplicity" ingredients PLUS almonds, coconut flakes, coconut butter, and mesquite and maca powders.
Orange Blossom
"Simplicity" ingredients PLUS almonds, cashews, fresh orange zest, orange blossom essential oil, and bergamot essential oil. (If still in our store when you read this, it's our last stock, as they have moved on to other flavors.)
Superchoc (Bestseller)
Unbelievable collection of ingredients to support health.
"Simplicity" ingredients PLUS honey with royal jelly and propolis, goji berries, freeze-dried raspberries, bee pollen, mesquite, maca root powder, Siberian ginseng powder, ashwaghanda powder, ginko biloba powder, burdock root powder, acai powder, reishi mushroom extract, passion flower powder, rose hips, and orange zest.
Acai Pomegranate
This is our favorite. We have adults rolling their eyes in ecstasy over this one. The ingredients on the box are listed below, and are different than those listed on the Gnosis Chocolate website.
"Simplicity" ingredients PLUS brazil nuts, black currants, barberries, freeze-dried pomegranate, freeze-dried acai, and camu camu berry.
